Monday, March 19, 2012

My 'NEW' DLSR

I just got my new (secondhand) Digital SLR Camera in the mail today. It is an older model and is only 6MP but with decent lenses and having it set to shoot in raw mode it should be better then my cheap AUD65 point and shoot compact from ALDI. The cheapie is a traveler DC140 it is 14MP but has pretty cheap optics, a great little 'disposable' camera to carry on the motorbike in my EDC bag when I am out.

Traveler DC10

The DSLR is a Pentax K100D that came with a Sigma 28-80 Aspherical Lens that has a Macro setting. The lens is a fairly cheap lens but being Aspherical with plastic body makes it small and light and is a great little everyday lens.

K100D and Sigma Lens

I also got a set of batteries (4xAA Used but enough charge to test it out) a battery case and a really nice camera bag from Case logic that was not included in the original listing but he included anyway. Needless to say the seller on eBay got a great positive feedback review from me and I may buy some lenses from him in the future.

.

Case Logic SLR Bag

A week or so ago a mate from my HAM radio club gave me an old Pentax film SLR camera, this is what led me to get a Pentax DSLR as he gave me a heap of M42 (Metric 42mm Screw thread) lenses with it in an aluminium hard carry case. I got an adaptor for the M42 lenses to convert them to K-mount which is what the K100D takes. This allows me to use all the older lenses.

M42 to K mount adaptor ring

They even still make M42's in Russia and you can buy them really cheaply on eBay. So I have a total of 6 lenses for the DSLR now but 5 are the old M42's so are manual everything, aperture and focus but that just adds to the 'old school' feel of using an SLR.

Hardcase with DSLR and lenses

I also crafted a mount for the DLSR to fit my microscope.. It is flaring the image a bit at the moment as you can see in the picture below but I will play with it and see if I can make the image any better. This was the first image I took with the microscope so I have a bit of tweaking left to do yet.

A logo from a small PCB
I call this one "Pacman The Small Maze"

And finally to round it all off here is a photo I took of a daisy, It was taken with the sigma lens in macro mode in raw mode. The only post processing was to blur the background a little more, it was already out of focus due to the narrow depth of field when using Macro anyway.